In Which the "New Normal" Comes Back to Haunt Us

Howdy, friends! It looks like this summer is in some ways gonna be a repeat of last summer, with frustratingly-vague (yet somehow oddly-specific) rules being issued from On High every 45 minutes or so. Anyway, we're still receiving "guidance" on all that, but we've got a few words about a few things, so let's cut the shuck and jive and get to it!

Firstly and most vaguely, it was just announced that the outdoor mask restriction was "eased," but only "where social distancing is possible." That... doesn't apply to us? Probably? And also it doesn't mean anything? Despite having an effective date, there's no actual concrete changes. Anyway, there's no real way to keep that kind of distance from other people in our beer garden unless you're sitting, and at that point you've probably already got your mask off, which makes it irrelevant. I dunno, this one is confusing (see? Just like last year!).

Secondly, on May 29th, breweries are allowed to open (FINALLY), as long as they don't open their dance floors. Honestly, we've heard the term "dance floor" far more times while reading covid guidance than we have in the past decade, which kind of seems like somebody in the State House has a whole thing about dance floors,* but we digress. The real gist of the jib here is that (as far as we can tell, at this point) won't need to require food orders in order to sell drinks... starting in over a month. You won't be surprised to learn that we think this is a bunch of hooey, considering the number of giant venues who never had to do crap like this (say, for example, a baseball rink that recently stopped being a mass-vaccination site because sports are more important than health), but we've played along for this long** so we might as well see it through.

But after you cut through all the mumbo-jumbo, it's best to take a step back and realize what's really important here, and that would be beer. And on that note, we've got two new beers for you this week (and neither of them is a beer that we released last week but forgot to mention in last week's blog, that's for sure) and we have a cask and as luck would have it we're also all stocked up on all your hot dog needs, so read on and/or drink up!

First on up, available in cans right now is SaBRU! We took a buncha wild 'n coconutty Sabro and paired it up with the beguilingly pineapple-forward BRU-1 and we jammed a crapton of each into one fermentor and it's tasty as heck and it's out now and you should drink some!

Next up on that ol' drinkin' docket is cask! This time around, we took our favorite beer to drink on cask - namely Extra Naked - and we jammed in a bunch of cool-sounding new-to-us hops that SOMEbody*** kinda forgot to write down so it'll be a tasty surprise for all of us on Thursday!

And, lastly but far from leastly, we've got us another can release on Friday! This one's a hoppy saison featuring El Dorado® and it's called Cone Crusher! The name is definitely a reference to hop cones and not an endorsement of people driving over the traffic cones that our neighbors leave all over the parking lot (you know, the ones with aggressive right-wing political stickers on their trucks? The ones who yell at you if you park in the parking lot?). Either way it's gonna be tasty and you should come grab a can or four!

* Fun (albeit tangential) fact: we get charged more for music licensing if we, and I quote, "allow dancing." So in other words: for legal reasons we have decided to side with the town council from the first half of Footloose. 
** We would remove our food requirement in a show of solidarity/protest, but there are legitimate concerns that - if we were to do so - the local hot dog industry would suffer irreparable damage
*** BEN.